


In All the Old, Familiar Places

by the_gramophone



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-03 04:35:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/377358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_gramophone/pseuds/the_gramophone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eduardo hates coming back for shareholder meetings, Mark pisses off Voldemort, and the chicken is not as forgotten as they thought. Somehow they find a way to get it together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In All the Old, Familiar Places

**Author's Note:**

> Cleaned up and re-posted from here: http://tsn-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/9415.html?thread=17906631in August 2011. For the purposes of this fic, everything in Harry Potter has been moved up about a decade. Everything belongs to Columbia Pictures and the incredible JK Rowling.

Eduardo strode out of the Palo Alto offices, head down. He hated coming back for the quarterly shareholder meetings. Watching Mark sit blank-faced and cruelly impassive across the table from him while his replacement explained this quarter’s numbers, Sean hovering in the background, was a torture that had made him consider on more than one occasion just saying _Fuck it all,_ and selling his shares. 

He could never do it. To sell them after everything he had gone through to get them felt wrong. So he continued to arrive promptly, every quarter, nod politely at the numbers, shake hands with Peter Thiel and the other assholes who had watched disinterestedly as he had been fucked over, and left immediately, ducking the eager advances of Dustin, who still didn’t understand that he was not Eduardo’s friend anymore, or Chris, who understood but did not want to accept it.  
Mark never tried to talk to him. 

The sky overhead was a steely grey as he walked to his rental. The wind picked up, whipping the branches of the trees back and forth as they moaned under the pressure. One crashed to the ground and Eduardo jumped out of the way, swearing, as in the distance he heard sirens tearing down the street.  
_The wind must be knocking shit over everywhere,_ he thought disinterestedly. 

“Wardo!”

He grimaced and kept walking. 

“Wardo!” Dustin was at his side, panting and red-faced. “Fuck-you- you really couldn’t wait for a – a fucking minute, could you?” he panted. 

Wardo stopped patiently and smiled as pleasantly as he could. He hoped whatever Dustin wanted wouldn’t take long. He was tired. 

“Yes, Dustin?”

Dustin stared at him, the wind flapping his Batman t-shirt so fiercely large expanses of his pasty white skin underneath were exposed. 

“Are you okay?” he asked finally. “That branch came really close.”

Eduardo shrugged. “I’m fine. But thanks.”

“Will you be okay getting back to the hotel? If you get caught in a storm – "

“It’s nearby,” Eduardo interrupted. He cocked his head, considering. “Is this a storm, though?”

Dustin opened his mouth to reply, but seemed to reconsider, instead taking a moment to breathe the air deeply. “It must have dropped at least fifteen degrees since the meeting got out,” he said quietly. “Also, it doesn’t smell like rain. It smells like- "

Eduardo grabbed his arm and turned him to face the building, where two immense hooded figures were floating, slowly approaching the entrance. 

_Mark,_ he thought desperately, _They’re here for Mark, who the fuck has he pissed off now,_ and the thought of Mark being made into something truly soulless, not the robot that he has been accused of, but a human being with no feeling, no passion – floored Eduardo, nailed him to the pavement where he stood. He could live with the knowledge that Mark will never again give two shits about Eduardo; his health or his happiness or the day-to-day workings of his life, but he does care about Chris, and Dustin, and his family, and Facebook. Facebook. Without a soul, Facebook will crumble. And Mark will stand there and watch it happen with the same apathy that he watched Eduardo fall, and Eduardo – Eduardo – 

“Do you think they have to go through the revolving doors, or can they just float through the windows?” Dustin whispered in his ears. Eduardo was so startled, by both Dustin’s presence, which he has forgotten about, and the ridiculousness of his question, that he laughed. 

Then he started running. The dementors were almost to the doors now – it appeared they could not simply fly through buildings, who knew – with no one inside any wiser. He could hear Dustin’s feet pounding behind him, but he has always been more athletic of the pair and he knew he would get there first. 

But not soon enough. _I will never park my car so fucking far away,_ he thinks viciously as they slip inside. He slams through the doors seconds after, the slapping sound of his feet on the tiled floor loud enough to draw the attention of Mark and Chris, who had been chatting with a worthless security guard in the lobby. 

The look on their faces sent daggers into his gut. Unprepared, they were all so unprepared for this. They integrated into the Muggle world and forgot to watch for magical dangers, forgot that magic is always around, even when they don’t acknowledge it. He wondered if Mark even kept his wand on him anymore, remembering how he had always complained at school that keeping it in the pocket of his cargo shorts was uncomfortable and poked him when he went on a coding binge. 

The thought helped, and he focused on it as he reached inside his suit jacket for his wand – twelve inches, maple, unicorn hair – fumbling in his haste to get it out quickly. The dementors ignored the commotion and continued towards Mark. 

Wand finally in his hand, Eduardo concentrated, pushes back the small, desperate knot of his mind that’s screaming “If you don’t get this right, you really will lose him forever!” and yelled, “Expecto patronum!” 

Now the dementors turned, as a silvery, bright, magnificent chicken bursts forth. 

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Mark muttered. 

The dementors reared back, robes flailing in the unfelt wind, before settling back upon their original course. 

“No, fuck you!” Eduardo screamed. “Expecto patronum! Expecto patronum! Expecto fucking patronum!” He was hoarse and perhaps crying a little by the end, but his chicken was doing the job admirably, squawking and clucking with all the outraged fury that only a mama hen can have. The dementors resisted a good four more seconds before fleeing out the front door, their proverbial tails between their legs. 

Eduardo sat down exactly where he was, hoping it looked casual and nonchalant, and not like he simply could not have stood any longer. 

Dustin walked in. “Well, I see you did everything without me,” he said petulantly. Chris flipped him off. 

A long silence ensued, heavy with everything that Eduardo was hoping they would never talk about. As soon as he got the feeling back in his legs, he was getting the fuck out of here. Probably. 

“So, uh, could anyone, um, tell me what’s happening?” the security guard broke in timidly. 

Mark looked over, startled. He patted his pockets awkwardly, then jabbed Chris in the side. “Chris,” he said. 

Eduardo smirked – clearly he had been correct about Mark and it amused him that after all this time, parts of him were still remarkably easy to read - Chris calmly walked over to the desk. “Obliviate,” he said, smiling serenely. The confusion lifted from the guard’s face, and he smiled agreeably. 

“Mr. Zuckerberg, if that’s all for now, I think I’ll take my dinner break,” he said, standing. 

Mark nodded absently, tugging on a curl that hung over his forehead. As soon as the man left, he looked up. “A chicken?” he asked incredulously. “Really Wardo? A chicken is your patronus?”

That stung, but Eduardo was determined not to let it show. He sniffed. “At least I managed to make one.”

Mark frowned. 

“I bet you could use some water or something,” Chris said quickly. “You must be exhausted. Dustin and I will go. Get the water. For you.”

Dustin looked up from where he had been leaning against the wall. “I ran too,” he protested. “It’s not my fault Wardo is in ridiculously good shape – "

“Yes, very brave,” Chris interrupted. “Come on.” He tugged the still-protesting redhead out of the room. 

Mark shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable with the obvious maneuvering his friends had just attempted. Wardo rolled his eyes and flopped back to lay down. If Mark wanted to say something, he could, but if he wanted to wait in silence, that was just as well too. Either way, he was going to be comfortable. 

He hooked his ankles around each other and closed his eyes. There was a creak nearby, so he could assume Mark was still hovering. He frowned and began to tap a beat on his stomach, an old nineties pop song that had been stuck in his head since he heard it on the radio that morning. 

“So, Wardo- "

He stubbornly kept his eyes shut. _Tap, tap-tap-tap tap, tap tap…._

“Wardo, stop it.”

“I am a shareholder and a co-founder and I saved your turncoat ass. So I will do whatever the hell I want, thank you.” _Tap tap tap tap-tap…_

“Okay, fine. But that is a ridiculous song.”

“It is not.”

Silence met him and Eduardo was infuriated by the fact that he knew, _he fucking knew,_ that Mark was shrugging at him. 

“You don’t even know what song it is.”

“Of course I do. You sing it every time you get drunk.”

Eduardo stopped tapping. He had forgotten that. He didn’t do it anymore; it was a leftover of years past, a Wardo-fact that had gone sour, but still - Mark remembered. 

“Why is your patronus a chicken?” Mark asked quietly.  
Eduardo opened his eyes. He was unsurprised to see that Mark had sat down next to him, cross-legged, in the space between his shoulder and his neck. 

He shrugged, closing his eyes again. It hurt to keep looking at Mark peering down at him, his curly brown hair forming a halo around his head. It made him think of other times, worse-lit, less dramatic, but infinitely more important. 

“It wasn’t always,” he said. “In high school I had a fox.” 

“Intelligent, sly, good at surviving,” Mark replied. Eduardo peeked an eye open. Mark, of course, noticed instantly and met his gaze with that laser-stare of his, the one that Eduardo had hoped that with time he would become immune to. “What do you think of?”

Eduardo shut his eyes again. “It doesn’t matter, Mark.” 

“Of course it does.” His voice was as unflappably calm as ever, the fucker. 

“No,” Eduardo sighed, “it doesn’t.”

Mark nudged his shoulder with his toe – he had recently traded in his flip-flops for the slightly more respectable Converse – and waited. 

“There was a night, at Kirkland,” Eduardo admitted eventually. “You probably don’t remember. TheFacebook had gone live the week before, and everyone was buzzed on the success. I came by, Chris and Dustin were out, you were coding. I sat down on the couch and turned on the TV. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I figured I’d wait until you finished or crashed.”

He peeked an eye open. Mark stared down at him, his face frowning with something utterly incomprehensible to him.  
Wardo closed the eye again. “Well,” he said with a small, rueful grin, “there was a Phoenix party I could have gone to. Also a house party on south campus. But I wanted to be there. So I stayed. And after just a few minutes, you unplugged yourself, and sat down next to me. 

"We barely talked. Just sat there, watching stupid, mindless shit for hours. There were so many other things you could have been doing and I knew that, but you – you sat down with me. Like old times. I really appreciated that. I had been worried, I guess. About what would happen after thefacebook went live.” 

He doesn't say that all his worries were completely justified. Or that that night was the last time Mark ever unplugged for him, the last night they ever had sex, the last night they were ever MarkandWardo. Mark knew. And Eduardo was relieved he doesn’t have to say it out loud. After all this time, the words still create an ache that he doesn’t know how to fix. 

The silence stretched on long enough to make Eduardo nervous. He began to tap his fingers against his chest again, and slowly opened his eyes. 

Mark has laid down, head at Eduardo’s feet. “I can’t create a Patronus,” he said, so softly Eduardo wondered if he was imagining it. “All my best memories are – tainted.”

Tainted. Eduardo felt sick. He had said too much, he had made Mark uncomfortable. Mark had pushed him away for a reason, for feeling things too much, for asking for too much in return. All of Mark’s best memories – thefacebook going live, the million member party, getting the angel investment – must be overwhelmed with the ugly presence of Eduardo’s naïve, blundering interference.

He needed a subject change. “Who sent dementors after you?” 

Mark shrugged. 

“Don’t do that, Mark.”

“What?”

“Shrug and roll your eyes like it doesn’t matter. It fucking matters. A lot of people could have been hurt. You could have been hurt. And they could come back for you. So, if you know why they were here, it’d be a pretty fantastic time to share, don’t you think?”

He felt the brush against his leg as Mark shrugged again. “Vol - _You-Know-Who_ -“ he corrected himself derisively, “created a private page on Facebook. I deleted it. It must have pissed him off.”

Eduardo took a second to process this. It didn’t help. He sat up to stare down at Mark. “You-Know-Who made a _Facebook page_?” he asked incredulously. 

Mark sniffed. “It’s not that unreasonable. Everyone else has one. Only I’m in charge and if I don’t want some bigoted psychopath on my website, I can kick him out.”

Eduardo whimpered and ran his hand through his hair, flopping back down to the ground. “Fuck, Mark, you are going to get yourself killed before you are thirty, you know that?”

“You think so?”

“Probably. Definitely if you continue pissing off volatile dictators.”

“Huh.”

Mark sat up and stared down at Eduardo again. He tilted his head, considering him, and Eduardo tried to be annoyed and offended. 

It was hard, though. Mark’s gaze was filled with equal parts tenderness, frustration, and a passion that he had only seen directed towards one other thing in the other man’s life. Mark took a shaky breath, closed his eyes and reached a hand out, slowly, and placed it, palm-down over Eduardo’s heart. He sat like that, eyes closed, perfectly still, for a whole minute, before opening his eyes again to smile and lean forward so his head now lay on Eduardo’s chest. 

“I have this recurring nightmare,” he murmured, the tips of his ears turning red, “that in-between our shareholder meetings you’re – something happens. Death Eaters, normally. Occasionally the mafia, although that’s so boring I would be very disappointed in you if that’s really how you die.” Eduardo laughed, despite himself. “It’s why I can’t conjure a Patronus. All of my best memories – everything good about me was with you, and when I think about that, when I think about you, I think about how I hurt you, and if something were to happen to you before I – before we could – "

He hid his face in the folds of Eduardo’s jacket and Eduardo realized that Mark was shaking, his hands clutching Eduardo’s suit jacket like a life raft. He put a hand to the curly mess that is Mark’s hair and held it there, letting the weight be a comfort – I’m here, I’m not leaving again, we will be okay. He’s not sure when he decided to forgive Mark, if it was during this conversation or long ago, but he knew that he couldn’t let him slip past again. 

Mark looked up, his eyes red and puffy. Eduardo smiled softly and grabbed the hand over his heart. He lifted it to his mouth, and kissed first every knuckle, then every fingertip, then the palm before holding it at his face between his hands. 

Mark crawled up his body, lifting one leg up to straddle Eduardo. He peered down at him anxiously, as if checking to see if this was real, if this was a trick or a dream. 

“You weren’t put under the Imperius Curse out in the parking lot, were you?” he asked bluntly.

Eduardo laughed. “No. I’m also not Dustin under the Polyjuice Potion.”

“Obviously. You were both in here a few minutes ago.”

“Right. Speaking of, they should be back soon, do you think we should- " Eduardo gestured vaguely to their suggestive position on the floor. 

“No, not really,” Mark said, and leaned in to grab Wardo by his ridiculous, windblown hair, kissing him soundly on the lips.

Kissing Mark was everything that Wardo had remembered it to be – exhilarating, filthy, and leaving him desperate for more.

“Shall we get the fuck out of here then?” he gasped when Mark broke away for air.

Mark nodded, absently tracing the line of Wardo’s jaw with his thumb, peppering his neck with kisses. 

“In a minute,” Mark said absently as he shifted his weight to grind down against Wardo’s groin. He groaned loudly, the sound echoing against the vaulted ceilings of the entryway. Mark smiled triumphantly and bent down to lick his way once more into Wardo’s mouth. 

~

Hours later, by the dim morning light of Wardo’s hotel room, Mark lay curled around Wardo, a hand wrapped possessively in his hair. “None of it meant anything without you,” he whispered to the shadows. “You can leave again, if you want. To your job and your apartment. But you have to come back. More often, I mean. Because everything I did, everything I do, is shit when you’re not around, even when it’s so obviously not, because Facebook is fucking awesome, it rules the internet, it shouldn’t feel like shit, but it does. So if you don’t mind, you should come back more. We can have sex, if you like. Or just hang out. Whatever. As long as you’re here.” He frowned. “Hopefully your subconscious catches some of this because it was awkward enough saying this to sleeping Wardo; I don’t wanna have to do it again.”

Wardo smiled slightly, his face turned away from Mark, and thought of the best way to tell Mark of the call he had made to his assistant while Mark was in the bathroom last night; of the boxes and luggage that were currently making their way from Singapore to Palo Alto. 

He thought maybe over breakfast.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr at abravelittletoaster!


End file.
